To Live A Healthy Life, Have A Cigarette and some Kit Kats
There is a scene in Woody Allen’s film, “Sleeper,” when Miles Monroe, the main character played by Allen, awakens after 200 years of cryopreservation and he is immediately given chocolate and a cigarette as both have proven to be healthy.
Maybe cigarettes and chocolate are good for you. I quit smoking 28 years ago and I limit my Kit Kat intake but if they find that both cigarettes and Kit Kats are healthy, I would be back to two packs and 10 Kit Kats a day, in a heartbeat. I would actually be quite annoyed if I found that decades of tobacco abstinence was totally unnecessary.
Science is always finding new cures and debunking old ones, like the latest reports that taking a baby aspirin a day to minimize the chances of a heart attack may actually not keep the doctor away and to the contrary, may instead cause internal bleeding.
A panel of experts reviewing data on a daily aspirin regimen to prevent heart attacks found that the net benefit for most Americans is very small and that the practice can carry real risks.
For three decades, an independent panel of experts known as the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, has been reviewing the evidence of aspirin use for preventing first heart attacks and strokes. Last month, the task force issued its latest recommendations on aspirin use, and it wasn’t good. The panel warned adults over 60 against starting an aspirin regimen for primary prevention of heart attacks. Primary prevention refers to patients who have never had a heart attack or stroke and do not have heart disease.
Aspirin can still be prescribed for secondary prevention, meaning people who have already had a heart attack, stroke or intervention like stenting or bypass surgery and face higher risk of subsequent cardiovascular events.
I am not going to be paranoid like the anti-vaxxers who believe that the COVID-19 vaccine is killing people or all of those people who are convinced that a flu shot will give them the flu, even though these current fallacies may one day be proven, like the aspirin findings. But for now, I have to follow the best science and get the vaccines and boosters and hope for the best.
Trusting medications is especially tricky in these days of COVID-19, especially with all the quackery and health foods and nutritional supplements on the market. They all sound pretty good until you realize the whole point is to make money and hopefully, not to kill people in the process, but if that happens, so be it. At best, hopefully, all these wonder chemicals are placebos and just do nothing but make a person think he’s doing something good for his body. Come to think of it, this description fits the big pharma and their scientists who strive to make billions for stockholders.
There have been a variety of outlandish, alleged remedies that had the backing of the medical establishment at the time and were later found unhealthy at best, like treating syphilis with mercury, treating mental illness with lobotomies, drinking arsenic or tapeworms to lose weight and using heroin-laced cough syrup.
Medieval doctors thought they could cure cancer by pressing a sacrificed puppy, kitten, rabbit or lamb on top of a tumor because they thought that cancer was like a “ravenous wolf” that would rather “feed off the sacrificed animal rather than the human patient,” as Dr. Lydia Kang and her co-writer Nate Pedersen put it in their book, “Quackery: A Brief History of the Worst Ways to Cure Everything.”
How ridiculous to think a dead puppy could cure cancer. That’s as absurd as a certain ex-president recommending to drink bleach to fight COVID-19, or to use hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malaria drug, that has been shown to be worthless or worse in fighting the pandemic. Or the next thing will be a doctor who is a candidate for U.S. Senate claiming that if you eat enough raspberry ketones, you’ll quickly lose weight, even though there is little scientific evidence that raspberries ketones are anything other than pretty red pills. Can you imagine anything so wild? Really these things happened, really.
Plinius the Elder, a Roman naturalist and navy commander of the early Roman Empire urged that pregnant women take powdered sow’s dung to relieve labor pains. During medieval times, a contraceptive recommended by doctors was for women to strap weasel testicles to their thighs, while others would mash up beaver testicles and mix them with moonshine.
To fight the plague in 1665, London school children were told they could disinfect themselves by smoking cigarettes. In the 18th century, mouth to mouth resuscitation wasn’t around yet, but tobacco smoke enemas were, giving rise to the idiom “blowing smoke.” The dangerous and utterly worthless method to resuscitate drowning victims was developed by The Institution for Affording Immediate Relief to Persons Apparently Dead from Drowning. The victim was dragged out of the River Thames, stripped and an enema would blow smoke into the person, manually or with bellows.
More recently, during the early 20th century, Lysol and other manufacturers of harsh disinfectants and detergents promoted their household-cleaning products for use as contraceptive “feminine hygiene” douches. Millions of women bought into the ad campaigns, and by 1911 the medical community had recorded 193 Lysol poisonings and five deaths as a result of the practice.
Our heads are filled with all kinds of ear worm jingles, some are true and some are absurd.
“An apple a day keeps the doctor away” is a common saying that appeared in the 19th century but is it factual? It turns out that this ditty may just be legit. A 2013 study using computer modelling compared eating apples with taking a common daily cholesterol-lowering drug to estimate risk of cardiovascular diseases. The computer model estimated that eating an apple a day was generally comparable for people over age 50 to using a statin drug to reduce low-density lipoprotein cholesterol.
“You deserve a break today, so get up and get away to McDonald’s.” I don’t think so.
I saw “Super Size Me,” a 2004 documentary film about McDonald’s and I haven’t gone near a Big Mac or fries ever since. I will never rid my brain of that visual of how a McDonald’s French fry has so many additives that it will stay in your system and not be digested for a millennium.
Red meat was good, then bad, now good and moderate alcohol intake is healthy, then not healthy so what is a body to believe? Maybe ignorance is bliss and I lament back to those innocent days when I didn’t know that hot dogs are processed meats made of the parts of the animal that are left over after the choice cuts are used up. Yes, once I had no idea that hot dogs come from animals that were very often raised in cruel and filthy factory farms. And that to boost the color of the hot dogs and improve their shelf life, sodium nitrate is added as a preservative. And that the World Health Organization (WHO) has categorized processed meats, like hot dogs, as Group 1 carcinogens, the highest category with the strongest evidence of being cancer-causing in people. Tobacco and asbestos are in the same category. The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) found that eating 50 grams of processed meat daily, or just one hot dog, can increase your risk of colorectal cancer by 18 percent. Or that children who eat one hot dog a week are seven times higher for developing a brain tumor than children who don’t eat hot dogs.
Most of us trust that we are kept relatively safe by the medical establishment and their doctors, regulatory authorities, licensing bodies and patenting offices. That hasn’t always worked out very well, as with the years from the 1930s to the 1950s when doctors and Big Tobacco joined in an unholy bond to promote cigarettes. Tobacco companies paid throat doctors to recommend smoking as a remedy for throat irritation while cigarette advertisements in medical journals were common alongside images of doctors smoking. The New York State Journal of Medicine ran ads to support the claim by cigarette brand Chesterfield that their cigarettes were “just as pure as the water you drink.”
For four decades, from 1937 to 1967, a relatively common way to treat people with mental illness was to chop away a part of their brain, known as the “ice pick” or frontal lobe, lobotomy, perfected by Dr. Walter Freeman, a Pennsylvania physician. Freeman performed 3,500 lobotomies from 1937 to 1967 and 14 per cent of his patients died and others were left permanently crippled or in a perpetual vegetative state.
In the 1950s and 1960s it was unfortunate for the pregnant women who took the drug thalidomide, which was heavily marketed to stem morning sickness. In 1961, the drug was banned because of a huge spike in the birth of infants with severe physical deformities. At least 80,000 babies died before birth and 20,000 were born without limbs due to thalidomide.
And then there’s that common recommendation by dentists to floss regularly, something that has been promoted since 1908 by the American Dental Association to help prevent the build-up of plaque, gingivitis and tooth decay. It turns out that there never was any scientific proof behind the flossing suggestion. In an analysis of 25 studies on floss, the AP found most of the studies, which the ADA cited as a basis for their claims, used unreliable methods; carried a “moderate to large potential for bias”; and sometimes tested few participants. One study tested 25 people after only a single use of floss. Some studies lasted a mere two weeks, not a sufficient duration for a cavity or gum disease to develop.
The next thing they’ll find is that rampant sex can lengthen life expectancy by 20 years, I hope.